iTunes LP and the iPad ⇥ mjtsai.com

David Millar:

“Apple to Discontinue ‘fancy HTML in a zip file’ Format”

Michael Tsai:

I’m not quite sure whether iTunes LP was a bad idea or simply one that neither Apple (aside from Steve Jobs?) nor the music producers actually had much interest in. How else to explain that Apple never brought it to iPad?

I think iTunes LP was a fine enough idea; ultimately, though, I can’t imagine that many people went out of their way to buy iTunes LPs instead of the usually-cheaper non-LP version of the album.

They were built using an extraordinarily flexible and easy-to-use SDK by way of TuneKit, which was basically just a website. Theoretically, that simplicity should mean that they should have worked perfectly okay on the iPad that shipped just six months after iTunes LP was introduced, and that the number of iTunes LPs created should have been more than could easily be catalogued on Wikipedia. If lots of people truly cared about them, there would be an easy way to find them in a user’s iTunes library and in the iTunes Store.